A major challenge for every business is finding the time to do it all. How do you grow your customers, revenue, and manage a business, all at the same time? Customer relationship management (CRM) software is essential to streamline processes to grow your small business.
There are many steps to grow a small business. Most business owners focus on chasing leads, communicating with customers, and analyzing sales. But, it’s hard to keep track of all this information.
How Do You Track All That Data?
Many small businesses track customer and sales information with Excel spreadsheets. But spreadsheets are a stopgap, not a solution.
I’m sure by now you’ve realized that spreadsheets have a lot of pitfalls. Some problems with tracking customer data on spreadsheets include:
- It’s time-consuming.
- The data is inaccurate.
- The spreadsheets get lost.
- The data doesn’t integrate with other systems.
- The information is hard to filter.
What if there is an easier way? CRM systems offer key benefits for your small business, which will make it easier for you to build relationships with your customers and grow your business.
If you’re already convinced and looking for the best CRM for small businesses, look no further.
1. Make Business Tracking Easier For You
CRMs help small businesses (and even churches) track data that is essential to understanding their customers, sales, and opportunities for the future.
All interactions and communications that your business has with leads, prospects, and customers are in one place, your CRM.
Unsure of the last time you spoke with a lead? Check your CRM to see the details of your last interaction. You can also update the contact information to keep it accurate for your whole team.
Why is tracking consumer information important? Consumer data matters when planning out marketing strategies, business plans, and sales projections. How can you plan for growth in your business if you can’t find the information on your customers?
CRM software should be the hub of your company’s interactions with all potential and current customers. In your dashboard, you can see all opportunities, sales, and ongoing projects. You can visualize the entire sales pipeline and make accurate assessments about the success of your business.
2. Attract New Customers With Personalization
How do you reach out to new customers? Get to know their habits? Their preferences?
CRMs can track and store the preferences of cold leads and turn them into warm ones. It can make each new customer’s experience with your brand a personal one.
Why do you need a personal connection with customers?
Firstly, customers expect personalization in their shopping experience. To personalize your relationship with each customer, you need data. CRMs gather customer data and help you target your marketing efforts to people based on their needs and preferences.
A recent study showed that 80% of customers would prefer to do business with a company that personalized its shopping experiences.
The best CRMs can show you detailed information about what a person clicked when they opened an email and how often they are reaching out to you and your team. With this information, you can guide each customer’s personal shopping experience with your company from lead to opportunity, and then to a sale.
3. Retain Your Current Customers
While it’s vital to attract new customers, we can’t forget about our current ones! Customer retention is essential to every business. Reports have shown that increasing customer retention rates by 5% increase profits by 25% to 95%. More so, it costs 5x more to attract new customers.
How can CRM help you with customer retention?
CRM software is the central location for all communications your team has with each customer. Did you exchange emails with a customer? Did they message you on social media? When did they last make a purchase? CRMs can easily track all the answers to these questions (and more) and ensure you’re keeping in touch with customers.
CRMs are known to help improve customer retention and satisfaction rates. Customers love to be engaged and have a personal experience with a brand (as we mentioned before). But it can be hard to guarantee every correspondence with a customer is a deeply personal one.
Well, CRM has templates to make things easier! You can create automated templates for responses to inquiries and for thanking customers. It takes the pressure of writing a new email for every message you receive.
4. Never Forget a Lead
Did you know that only 10% to 25% of all leads are followed up? Opportunities are missed because it’s often difficult to remember to follow-up.
With CRM, you won’t miss an opportunity again.
Why? Reminders are integrated with your CRM. These reminders can be for project management assignments, activities, or lead follow-ups.
Worried you will forget to email after a phone call with a lead? Set a reminder in your CRM for that contact, and you will be alerted when it’s time to get back in touch. Don’t miss 90% of those leads because you forgot to follow up.
5. Accurate Data in One Place
How do you currently pull reports? Are you sifting through spreadsheets, sticky notes, and sales reports? CRM reporting tools make it easy for small business owners to make decisions quickly and access the information they need when they need it.
What types of reports can you get from a CRM?
CRM reports are comprehensive and include sales performance, total sales, outcomes, profitability, and lead analysis, to name a few. Overwhelmingly, businesses have agreed that analytics and reporting are the most useful features of automatic marketing software, such as CRM.
6. Save Time With Automation
Administrative tasks are painless with the help of CRM. Instead of spending time chasing down customer interactions through emails or databases, just go to your CRM. Daily marketing tasks, like welcome emails, purchase follow-ups, and order notifications, can be automated. Messages are sent out at the right time to the right person.
CRMs help your business be more productive and efficient with your time.
With the right CRM in place, you can increase productivity by up to 30%. Doesn’t every small business want to be more productive?
Is CRM Worth It?
It can be hard to adjust to a new system or software. CRMs bring big value to businesses. The average return from a CRM is $8.71 for every dollar spent.
But consider this, 91% of businesses with more than 10 employees already use CRM. Your competition is already getting the benefits of automation, leads, and sales from a CRM. So, can you afford to miss out? Don’t be left behind the competition.
Which CRM will you choose to grow your small business?
DepositPhotos – client retention
